Mailing the story:

Google and IBM want their future employees to have large-scale cluster computing chops, so they're investing several million to get them while their young. The companies are teaming up to promote the study in academia. Their ambition is to lower the cost and logistics of collegial research on parallel computing — a technique that spreads computational tasks across many computers. Google and IBM hope to advocate the cause by offering the considerable gear necessary to universities remotely.

[Not directly FOSS related but still of interest. - Scott]